Children for sale, cheap

When Frankea Dabbs abandoned her baby girl on a New York subway platform last week, it was all so sadly retro.

She could have just used the Internet.

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If she'd been with me at a melancholy U.S. Senate hearing, she would have learned of the noxious, unregulated practice of "re-homing," or basically giving your kid away on the Internet.

Witness Megan Twohey, a New York-based Reuters reporter, earlier brought a clandestine world to light, with a series that at minimum should remind media bashers about the role of the press in disclosing social tragedies and government outrages.

Off loading, or re-homing, mostly involves children adopted from overseas who overwhelm parents. The dynamic of a parent feeling at sea may be akin to Dabbs' desperation with her natural born child, even if law enforcement was far more vigilant with her.

"'I would have given her away to a serial killer, I was so desperate," Twohey recalled being told by one parent who advertised her child on an online forum.

You use the net to make a private transaction online, often with people about whom you know zilch, and at most using a notarized power of attorney to transfer custody.

Since money doesn't directly change hands, this is not trafficking, though some government funds and benefits can follow a child from one set of parents to another.

And despite lots of "abuse and neglect" laws, no state or federal laws specifically prohibit this practice. And where there are laws vaguely on point, they can be confusing, not well known and almost never enforced.

By studying Internet forums, Twohey learned of cases such as a Wisconsin couple who adopted a troubled teenage girl from Liberia but decided they'd had enough and placed an ad.

They got a response from an Illinois couple and handed her over in a trailer park, merely signing a notarized statement announcing the de facto strangers as the new guardians.

They didn't know that the Illinois woman's two biological kids had been permanently yanked due to her own psychiatric problems and violent tendencies, or that her boyfriend (not her husband, with whom she would later procure five other kids this way) was a bad guy who'd do time for child pornography.

They didn't know the couple fabricated an upbeat "home study" used by child welfare officials in traditional adoptions to assess a prospective parent's worthiness.

But the sleazy woman, who lived with one of the two men in pigsty conditions in at least three states, drove the girl to the Stephentown, N.Y. home of the woman's mother.

Illinois authorities alerted the FBI and New York State Police. The state simply put the girl on a Greyhound bus to Wisconsin, where her original adoptive parents wouldn't have her back. She wound up in a local shelter, then a Louisiana home for troubled girls, and is now living by herself in Milwaukee.

Our sleazy Illinois woman, now joined by her husband, then fooled a Virginia couple (the husband was actually a cop) who gave up a troubled 5-year-old adopted Guatemalan boy. They took him to their own Stephentown pad.

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Once again, authorities tracked them down, but only because they were checking into the curious drowning of a disabled man who'd been living with them.

New York took the boy into state custody but leveled no charges against the couple. The state deems it a misdemeanor to transfer custody of a child across state lines without government approval.

Timothy Northrup, a New State Police investigator who was involved in both matters, said the ramifications of the Internet trade are clear.

"You're going to have kids re-homed to pedophiles who will hold them down there in some cell. You're opening these kids to human trafficking, sex trafficking and sex slavery."

The Senate hearing included a Health and Human Services official suggesting unconvincingly that help was on the way. The committee members' meager attendance suggested the same.

Since the series, State, Justice and HHS officials have huddled, and HHS has requested states to do better with assisting struggling adoptive parents.

That's it.

But senators did voice outrage. They're good at that. They're even better at then doing nothing. The hearing adjourned.